Plenty of Perugino’s fresco cycles survive, but almost all have been detached, sold, reassembled in a museum or redone inside a church that has changed three times in the meantime. The Collegio del Cambio is the exception: the Audience Hall is exactly as Perugino left it in 1500, with its frescoes, its carved wooden benches, its floor and its ceiling.
It is a small room, it takes forty minutes, it costs six euros, and people walking along corso Vannucci find it open without knowing it is there. For me it is the most beautiful thing in Perugia.
The only problem is the split timetable: the Collegio closes between 13:00 and 14:30 every day, and on Sundays it opens only in the morning, so if you arrive in the city on a Sunday afternoon this visit is off.
Who was the young man in the workshop who may have left his hand on these walls?
What the Cambio was, and why it needed a room like this
The Collegio del Cambio was the guild of the money changers, the men who exchanged coins and lent money in a city where dozens of different currencies circulated. It was not a popular trade: the Church considered usury a sin, and money changers lived on the edge of it.
The Sala dell’Udienza was where disputes among the members, and with their clients, were settled. That is why the programme of the frescoes is not devotional but moral: this is a room in which someone has to decide what is right, and the walls remind whoever judges which virtues he ought to have.
The guild commissioned the work in 1496 and Perugino delivered it in 1500, at the peak of his career, when he was the best paid painter in Italy.
The walls: the prophets, the sibyls and the heroes of antiquity
Why does a room built for bankers hold twelve seers and a handful of Roman heroes? On one wall stand the prophets and the sibyls, six and six, lined up under an open sky, with the Eternal Father above among the angels. It is the classic theme of expectation: the Hebrew prophets and the pagan seers who, according to the medieval reading, had announced the same thing from two different traditions.
On the other wall are the figures of antiquity, divided by virtue: Prudence and Justice with Fabius Maximus, Socrates and Numa Pompilius; Fortitude and Temperance with Lucius Sicinius, Leonidas, Horatius Cocles and Scipio. Men of Rome and Greece painted as models for Umbrian merchants of the fifteenth century.
Look at how they are arranged: standing, in a row, each in his own space, in front of a landscape that dissolves into a blue haze. It is Perugino’s formula, the one that made him adored and then accused of repeating himself, and here you see it in its best version.
The self-portrait hung on a nail
There is one detail that almost everybody misses, and it is the reason this room is unlike any other. On a pilaster between two scenes, Perugino painted a gilded frame hanging from a nail, and inside it he put his own face: about forty-five years old, a broad fleshy face, a red cap, eyes that do not look for the viewer. It is not idealised in the slightest.
Below the frame, another painted plaque carries a Latin inscription worth translating: Pietro Perugino, outstanding painter. If the art of painting had been lost, he would have found it again; if it had never been invented, he would have brought it this far.
No admirer wrote that. He had it written himself, on the wall of the room he was painting, while he was painting it.
Who actually painted it, and the boy who was passing through
How much of this room is by Perugino’s own hand? Art historians have been asking that for two centuries, because in 1500 his workshop was large and he was forever travelling between Perugia and Florence.
Scholars agree on this much: the overall design and the main figures are his, while parts of the decoration, of the grotesques on the ceiling and of some secondary figures go to the assistants. Among those assistants, in the years when the workshop was busy with this commission, there was a boy from Urbino called Raphael. That he took a hand in these walls is not proven and most scholars rule it out, but his presence in Perugino’s workshop in those years is documented.
The ceiling is covered in grotesques, the repertoire of little monsters, scrolls and painted cameos that artists had copied from the buried rooms of the Domus Aurea, rediscovered only a few years earlier: it is the detail that dates the room better than any document.
The Cappella di San Giovanni Battista, which is included
The ticket also covers a second room that hardly anybody visits: the Cappella di San Giovanni Battista, frescoed between 1512 and 1529 by Giannicola di Paolo, a pupil of Perugino. It is smaller, later and less famous, and for that very reason it shows well what happens to the master’s formula when somebody else uses it: the same poses, the same blue landscape, and far less air.
Practical information
Details checked on 4 September 2026 on the official website of the Nobile Collegio del Cambio. Prices and opening times change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Admission costs 6 euros and covers the Sala dell’Udienza, the Sala dei Legisti and the Cappella di San Giovanni Battista.
Opening times. The Collegio opens Monday to Saturday from 9am to 1pm and from 2:30pm to 5:30pm; on Sundays and public holidays it opens from 9am to 1pm.
Free admission. Children up to 14 in a family group go in free, as do disabled visitors with one companion, tourist guides accompanying a group and teachers accompanying a school party.
Getting there. The entrance is at corso Vannucci 25, with a door of its own on the street, separate from the one of the Galleria Nazionale. From the Pincetto minimetrò stop it takes five minutes on foot.
How long it takes. Forty minutes for the three rooms. An hour if you stop to read the inscriptions.
Where to go next
In the same building, fifty metres further back, you find the works of the National Gallery of Umbria, which holds the altarpieces of Perugino and his workshop. The Collegio opens at nine and closes early in the afternoon, which is why the two-day itinerary in Perugia puts it first.
Photo credits: the audience hall is by Messer Amanuense Perusino (CC BY-SA 4.0); the others from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA licences. Reproductions of works of art are in the public domain.
